Mormon Reform Party

The Mormon Reform Party was a short-lived classical liberal and Jeffersonian political party which was founded in 1844 as a vehicle for Mormon prophet Joseph Smith's presidential campaign. The party's platform was "the better to carry out the principles of liberty and equal rights, Jeffersonian democracy, free trade, and sailors' rights, and the protection of person and property." It also advocated for the gradual, compensated abolition of slavery by 1850, funded by revenue from the sale of public lands and from salary cuts to members of the US Congress; his proposition received widespread support in Kentucky. He also supported the reduction in size of the US House of Representatives to increase efficiency and decrease the government's power, replacing prisons with seminaries of learning so that intelligence would banish barbarism, advocated for the immediate amnesty of all convicts and for further sentencing to involve manual labor, supported open borders and freedom of migration, and supported accepting Texas, California, and Oregon into the union. Smith originally ran for President as a protest candidate, but he became popular in East Coast newspapers as well as among the Mormon community in Nauvoo, Illinois, giving him an actual chance of victory. Mormon political conventions in Boston, Massachusetts and Dresden, Tennessee were attacked by anti-Mormon mobs, however, and Smith's murder on 27 June 1844 prevented the presidential election from becoming a bloodbath.